“Wellness, beauty, cosmetics and health will be one and the same,” declared Claire Hobson, executive vice president and global business director of The Future Laboratory. That statement summed up the overarching theme of the CEW Global Trends Report presentation, Future Focus: Long Beauty, Tuesday morning at New York’s Union League Club.
CEW teamed up with The Future Laboratory to uncover where the beauty industry is headed thanks to consumers’ increasing interest in health and wellness. Hobson identified eight key drivers that will drastically impact the future of beauty. First, consumers are not planning. “Consumers are in the moment,” said Hobson. “What that causes is a lack of loyalty.” She cited a study that said of the people asked, most wouldn’t care if 73 percent of brands disappeared tomorrow. “What is it that we can do to make consumers stop and think?” questioned Hobson.
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Digital is also rapidly changing the beauty industry, but Hobson cautioned against “fairytale innovation,” or the idea that digital advancements are solving our problems. There are more than 100,000 fitness and health apps. Still, 671 million people are obese and 2.1 billion are overweight. “While we have the technology, we still have a problem,” said Hobson. “While the innovation is there, one of the roles that we need to play is a level of education.”
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Stress and hyper-connectivity is equally as important when thinking about the future of beauty. “While we thought technology and the advancement of having a device in our hands would make us more productive, it’s actually not,” said Hobson. “We are going to hit a wall.” She added that the stress of always being connected is starting to make us ill, which is causing consumers to look for brands that offer a sense of quietness and mindfulness.
All of this stress has led to what philosopher Pascal Chabot calls “burnout nation.” “This is where wellness, beauty, mental well-being—it’s a very fertile area,” said Hobson. “It couldn’t be more perfect for you to leverage from a behavioral point of view. Consumers need your help to be able to deal with this because at the moment on their own, they’re not dealing with it very well.”
Also important to note is the fact that life expectancy has been growing three months per year since 1840. “Being able to forecast and innovate against this is significant,” said Hobson. “People need to be fit; they need to be well; they need to be on their game; they need to be mentally there.” Ideally, added Hobson, this will lead to increased brand loyalty.
What is changing significantly in terms of aging is people are not allowing nature to run its course; retirees are not sitting on the couch. In fact, the average age of people launching start-up businesses in the U.S. is 55. “Do not apply antiaging to these people,” instructed Hobson. “They want to be optimized, not antiaged.”
Holistic health is one of the biggest trends across all categories at the moment. “It’s important that we talk about cosmetics, we talk about beauty, we talk about wellness and we talk about health in a converged environment now,” said Hobson. “It’s not about being perfect. It’s about taking part and feeling good and looking good.”
To that end, consumers now view beauty as holistic, rather than cosmetic. “We are starting to see the lexicon, the terminology, mirrored in the ingestible and nutritional arena,” concluded Hobson. “You as leaders and innovators in this category will start to see certain crossover, and all I can say is that we’ve not seen anything to counteract that — we are actually seeing it on a much more pointed curve.”